In July 2000, Steve Jobs bought the rights to a little music application called SoundJam. Six months later, iTunes 1.0 was released.

Almost 13 years on, Mavericks OS X 10.9 has just been let into the wild. You upgraded on the day of the release, of course, then lost an evening repairing disk permissions and deleting folders left behind by ancient app installs (just in case they're the culprits slowing your Mac to a kerb crawl).

After a few days, you've got everything just as you like it, and you're growing to love Apple's latest cut of OS X. It's nippy. And while the interface design updates may not shout, they're worth having.

But there's a little bit of you wishing that Apple had pushed itself harder. iOS 7 was epic, right? So why does Mavericks feel so safe?

We understand you. We love Mavericks. But there's a world of dandy third party applications that wish Apple had brought into the fold. If you're reading this, Tim Cook, you're only a year away from the release of OS X 11 - there's still time to make the right calls.

Of course, if you don't fancy waiting a year for Cook to do The Right Thing, you can add this lot today in seconds yourself...

ALFRED

Five apps Apple should have included in Mavericks 10.9

Spotlight is a keyboard launcher. Only it's not massively smart or usable. Alfred is both. Recently given a v2.0 upgrade, the little app is triggered by a keyboard shortcut of your choice, and the resulting pop-up will take a whole bucket load of orders - from finding and starting iTunes tracks to searching for contacts. What really lifts it above the herd, though, is the growing library of workflows you can install, mostly created by Alfred's dedicated fans. We at Stuff love Asana, for example - and with a single download and install from the Alfred library, we can now flick tasks into the Asana database in seconds.

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iA Writer

Five apps Apple should have included in Mavericks 10.9

Pages. Mmmm... maybe not. TextEdit. Not quite so mmmm, but still no. iA Writer. Now that's more like it. You are a true Apple fan, and so you love writing. You're also a sucker for beautiful interfaces. Put the two together, and you grin so broadly that your cheeks hurt. iA Writer does exactly that, and doesn't charge you money for it. Switch it to fullscreen, then hit Focus Mode. Transfixing, isn't it? It's also the app being used to write this copy, using Markdown for formatting (which you should now go Google, because it's glorious and addictive). Get the feeling we like it?